Seagate Wireless Mobile Portable Hard Drive Storage 500GB STDC500400 (Blue)

Seagate makes a very simple product here and I'm not sure why there are people that have provided a negative review. I do agree that the documentation is lacking, but the online support and knowledge base is in-depth. To be fair to the product I'll write my opinion, I hope it balances out those that have made less than 4 stars.1. I have connected this to my laptop (USB and wireless), Nexus 7, iPad, iPhone, and Kindle Fire.2. Transferring data (mostly movies) is easiest through the USB connection with the laptop, but can be done via wi-fi.3. Playing back movies: I have successfully done this on all devices. However, the Kindle Fire tablet was the worst experience. I believe it is more to do with that tablet than the Seagate wireless device. Movie playback was done in HD (720p and .mp4 format) with flawless play. Video was clear and sound in sync. Again, except for the Kindle. The Kindle wouldn't even play the video.4. As far as the set up goes, it was more guess work. I truly didn't have this set up until I connected my iPad to it using the Seagate Media app. The first time that I did that, I was walked through a typical set up... the device established a connection to my home wi-fi, downloaded updates, re-named the wi-fi broadcast name, set a password, among other things. Once I did this I had a secure, private network that any data on there was at least protected behind a wi-fi password.5. Overall, I see a lot of benefit to this device. It's a mobile wireless hard drive. Through the tablet app (android or apple) you can instantly stream movies or music. On a laptop, you can back up any data files. I do think it has it's limitations. It will not work very well as a home media server. But for travel and backing up critical data, it works great.

I wanted to love this. It's 500G, and I like to travel. Unfortunately, it's so difficult to use that I sent it back. I'm fairly technically savvy and I gave up. The reviews about the lack of documentation are true - the setup guide is just pictures, no words. The website isn't much better. It's not that hard to set it up and connect it to the app. The difficult part is storing, accessing, and streaming the media. Many of my video files wouldn't play in various acceptable formats I tried. But more importantly to me, there is no viewer for epubs and pdfs. If I opened one of those files, it asks to copy it to my phone for viewing. That completely defeats the purpose of having this extra storage! Maybe there's a viewer or another way to look at the files, but the instructions and website provide no clue how to do that. There is also no way to store Audible books then retrieve them for playing through the Audible player. The app just doesn't recognize them and won't open them. I gave this three stars because I though the initial setup was not difficult, it offers 500G, and it's a nice design.

This works great when traveling in the car with my granddaughter. It took some effort to get it to work consistently with our Amazon Fire, but I finally got it to work. I would like some upgrades to the app. Because my grandchildren can't read yet, I have to set it to video. And I have to copy a jpg to the drive for each video in order to have a picture for them to see what movie they want. Also, episodes from a tv series shows every episode . It would be nice to have all the episodes show with one picture and when that is clicked then show the episodes. All in all I am very happy with the drive. I keep it charged and can just grab it and put it in my purse as we go out the door.

What a disappointment. After 5 months over very gentle usage it will no longer power up. Its the last Seagate product I'll ever buy.

The only reason I'm giving it two stars is because after an hour of trying to get it to work by following instructions Amazon (not Seagate) support helped me - for another hour - and got me to the point I could do drag and drop off my hard drive. The Seagate apps were useless and the wireless thing wasn't happening at all. Five days later Seagate support came back and told me to do a reset. I went through those instructions three times and it finally did show up as a "network" in my Settings on my Android phone and my iPad Mini. Then it went wacky, on each in a different way. So now after hours of trying to get the thing to do what it's advertised to do, I have to decide whether to keep trying, trash it, or just use it as a backup to my hard drives and BUY some other gadget to back up my devices.

It works really good with iPhone and iPad for pictures and files

Be advised that Seagate does not disclose the fact that the device will not open and stream movies or videos transferred from iTunes unless you purchase third party software to remove the digital rights management (DRM) codes. You will need to remove the DRM code in order for movies transferred from iTunes to stream. To do that, you'll need to purchase third party software, which will add to the cost of using is device. Once I purchased and installed DRM removal software on my Windows PC, and then ran each movie I'd purchased on iTunes through that software, I was able to transfer the movies to the device, and view them. Also, it can take awhile for the device to establish its wifi signal, although once it does I found I could connect easily with my ipad. So the device works ok, but Seagate does a lousy job of explaining to users the tips and tricks of using the device.

Really great product, & app functions well.